


Beyond the stars

by Starvoidd



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Self-Reflection, branches off at that point, rip lance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 00:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12737262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starvoidd/pseuds/Starvoidd
Summary: He feels as though something should happen – something that would spur him into motion. Something that would at least give him an objective, or a goal, or even something vaguely threatening to deal with, but instead he’s faced with nothing.No change. No deviation. Nothing to get the next leg of his story started.There’s only the sound of silence to keep him company, and the longing for something more.After the wormhole scatters the Lions of Voltron, Lance finds himself alone.





	Beyond the stars

**Author's Note:**

> technically a re-post because I have commitment issues with this website

**0 minutes**

 

The first thing Lance realises when he comes to is that there’s dirt on his face.

There’s dirt on his face, and there’s dirt in his hair – dry and course, as if someone had thrown a handful of earth directly at him. His lips feel cracked and sore (everything’s _sore_ -) and for a moment he wonders in a panicked daze if Pidge has managed to seal his eyelids shut with the medical glue –

\- but the moment passes unspectacularly, and he blearily blinks open one eye.

He’s met with more dirt.

He attempts to blink it out, and fails.

 

**2 minutes**

The second thing Lance realises when he comes to is that he is alone.

The throb behind his eyelids is still there, ever present - like the sand that you trek home from the beach and still find in the foot-well of the car three years later - but he can't hear anything except his own heavy breath

Keeping his head perfectly still, he shifts his eyes around his small area of vision. Dirt – dirt and sand and grit and dirt and more _dirt_ for as far as he can see, yet not a single trace of anyone from the castle. Hell, not even Coran’s in sight, and he’s always hanging around somewhere nearby.

Lance goes to say something, attempting to clear his lungs, but he’s faced only with the burning scrape of a throat that hasn’t welcomed water in a long while.

It hurts.

Lance swallows.

Alone is never a good thing to be when you’re surrounded by a desert-come-wasteland without any means of getting _out_ of said desert-come-wasteland. The throbbing behind his eyes is only growing worse with every second he spends staring blankly at the red sky above him, and his helmet is partially shattered, the cracks spread like a spider web across the left hand side of the visor. Slowly –

Ever so slowly –

He reaches up a hand to press the button on the side of the metal. The intercom buzzes to life.

 “- Hel-… hello?”

The voice that leaves his lips is barely his, cracked and painfully high strung. Listening to it hurts, but differently to the way his shoulder throbs with every shift of his body on the soil. 

“Is anyone there?”

 

He waits for a moment. His fingers curl into a fist, gathering up a handful of earth and crushing it beneath his palm. The hiss of the static does nothing to calm him.

“It’s Lance. Is – Shiro, can you hear me?”

 

“Hunk?”

 

“…Pidge, are you there?”

 

The white noise continues.

 

“Say… say something.”

 

“Please, I – I don’t know where I am.” He says, and his voice breaks into a funny gasp that has him swallowing the words and biting his lip. He can taste the blood laying thick on his tongue.

“…Keith?” he tries. “C’mon. Don’t… don’t leave me hanging buddy.”

The lengthy silence continues. He can feel his palms beginning to sweat.

After a minute or two of incessant buzzing from the speakers, he lets out a choked curse and lowers his fist to rest on the ground beneath him, looking up through the cracked glass to the sky with a futile prayer on his lips. _Someone tell me what’s going on_ , he thinks. _I don’t remember anything past –_

\- and -

\- and it hits him again in the chest like a freight train, forcing him to inhale sharply, as if his lungs are aching for air, for breath –

\- because the _wormhole_ –

\- and as he lays on the ground, face up to the atmosphere above him, eyes wide, the event comes to him in sporadic pieces -

 

A flash of purple –

The frantic shouts coming through his com –

A heat so blistering he can still feel the ghost of it roll across his skin –

A hoarse scream ripping through his head –

The slow snap of his bone, the tear of tendon and tissue and the terror –

\- the terror shredding his thoughts to pieces as he spirals down through the rock and dust and vacuum to –

 

\- here.

 

This is where he ended up, then.

Yeah, that makes sense.

 

It explains something, at least – why there seems to be a trail of blood trickling down his temple, for instance, and he reaches up to remove the helmet, being careful not to dislodge too many shards of glass into his face. The thought that the surrounding air might not actually be breathable only occurs to him after he’s taken one long, gratuitous inhale, and by that time it’s evident that he won’t be having any problems with the atmosphere. Besides, the glass of his helmet was crushed.

If he was going to die a slow death through suffocation, he’d be well on his way already.

Though the landscape is barren, the air surrounding him is a world away from the pathetic excuse of oxygen that’s recycled on the castle. It’s as if he’s stepped into a forest on earth – aside from the fact that the planet he’s lying on is clearly not earth, and there isn’t a tree in sight. Although he supposes the planet technically _is_ earth, because that’s what he seems to be lying on – but it’s _earth_ , not _earth-earth_. The line of through quickly becomes too confusing. He drops it.

He drops the helmet too, letting it rock slightly as the rounded metal comes to rest on the ground, red light glinting back into his eyes. Everything seems to be red here, he thinks – even the soil looks somewhat rust coloured, if not russet, and the sand is similar, if not slightly paler. The sky is obvious, of course; he looks up just to confirm it, but it hasn’t strayed from the scarlet that’s almost offensive in its intensity. Thinking about it, he’s probably the only streak of blue on the entire planet if the surrounding view is anything to go by. He can only hope that the sands fade to somewhere habitable out of his sight.

There’s got to be something here, right?

Unless it’s like Mars.

(He prays it’s not like Mars.)

(Lance prays for a lot of things in that moment)

 

**4 minutes**

 

The third thing Lance realises when he comes to, is that Blue is dead.

 

He hadn’t noticed she was even here at first; he can feel her, usually – like a constant presence somewhere in his chest. Comforting.

Reassuring.

But once his breathing had evened out and he’d regained some sense of calm, he’d slowly pulled himself into a sitting position to look around properly –

\- and there she was.

Directly behind him, out of sight from where he was lying on the floor, but now that he’s looking at her, he feels tears prick at the corner of his eyes, and something in his stomach drops –

\- because with just one glance, he _knows_.

Blue is half-buried in the impact crater, hind legs mangled and ripped apart, her head missing half of the cranium, shards of blue and daggers of metal pointing upwards towards the expanse of red above in a final salute. There’s a gaping hole where the cockpit should be, and Lance can see the pieces scattered around on the soil like discarded scrap metal; the smell of iron, he realises, isn’t just from the blood of his head wound, but the burning remains of –

\- of –

 _Oh god_ –

 

 

 

 

 

 

(He can see the smoke billowing upwards into the sky, rising in swirls before dispersing into the thin air.)

 

(And it hurts.)  

 

**9 minutes**

 

It takes Lance the best part of five minutes to stand steady on his feet. He knows, because he times it, counting quietly to himself in his head.

Three minutes to drag his body upright and haul himself onto shaky knees, and then another two to finally find the strength to propel himself upwards. It’s pathetic how his limbs are still swaying, desperately trying to balance himself; the gravity here, if anything, seems to be greater than that on earth, cementing his feet to the ground as if magnets were holding him in place. The effort it takes to make the first shaky step forward is draining.

Because if he’s going to do anything on this goddamn planet, he’s going to make it to Blue.

 

 

The walk is painful.

It’s as if the weight on his shoulders has become just that; hands pushing his down towards the earth, making every step a battle that’s slowly sapping what little energy he has left. He leaves sunken footprints behind him, the imprint of his boots repeated backwards to the point where he started.

His ankles almost give out in the process, but he eventually stumbles forward to lean on the side of Blue that isn’t scorched and blackened.

The metal shines, and Lance thinks that he’s crying.

He can see the damage fully now, and there’s no way in hell he can even attempt to salvage what’s left. He wants to reject the thought, push it down and convince himself that she’s fine –

(that he’s fine -)

But even if her consciousness survived impact, it’s painfully obvious that her body hadn’t.

It’s as if he’s looking at a skeleton – like she’s in the process of being built, pieces of metal and wiring and plastic sticking out at unnatural angles, parts of her body not quite soldered together correctly. He could walk inside if he wanted, right into the space where the control room used to be; part of the surface is still attached to the left wall, but the rest has been ripped away and is part buried in the dirt a little way away, looking like a shard of bone sticking upright from muscle. His jacket is slung over a piece of discarded metal, ripped at the shoulder and covered in sand, but the sight of it makes something in his chest tighten, and suddenly Lance can’t breathe.

His legs give out beneath him, letting his body slide down the side of Blue and rest on the sand at his feet in a tangle of limbs and armour. He pushes the palms of his hands against his eyes, dragging in a shaking breath, gritting his teeth and desperately willing away the sting of tears in the corners of his eyes.

Stop it.

 _Stop it_.

Shiro wouldn’t cry, he thinks. Shiro would do something. He wouldn’t waste an hour of his time sobbing next to the wreckage – he’d –

He’d get up and look for water. Or shelter. Or start a… a fire.

Pidge would try and repair the damage, he’d imagine –

And Hunk, Hunk would be fine.

And Allura would be fine.

And Keith –

And Coran –

 

They wouldn’t give up.

He knows this.

Lance _knows_ this.

 

But in that moment, sitting in the corpse of Blue, he can’t help but feel as though the stars above are mocking him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**20 minutes**

Blue cannot be left the way she is. Lance won’t allow it.

He picks himself up off the floor a while later, with sore eyes and damp cheeks, but the thought that she’d be left in this state overwhelms whatever other feelings he'd harboured up until that moment. Now that the sun has risen a little higher in the sky, the hazy quality of the sunlight has been replaced by clearer rays; on one hand, he can thankfully see a lot better now. On the other –

On the other, he can see every tiny scratch and rip and tear in the metal of Blue’s body. His hands still shake when he raises them to empty space where the side door used to be - it’s lying in the dirt near her hind legs, seemingly ripped from the frame, leaving an ugly portion of jagged metal swinging from hinges that threaten to pull away from the wall. Lance carefully pushes it aside, wary of the sharp edges on his gloveless fingers, and comes to a stop in the middle of the control room.

Or, at least, what’s left of it.

Thankfully, the majority of the floor is still level and in place, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the room. The ceiling’s caved in near the rear end, the metal battered inwards so that parts of the wiring are hanging out from the ducts, spilling out like snakes onto the cabinets and shelves. Almost everything that had been safely stored away in crates and boxes lies scattered in the general area of the crash site – Lance is sure he saw a few items of spare clothing strewn across the sand a fair few metres away, and he can see the contents of his cooler strewn near the remains of the hangar wall through the smashed window across from him.

From what he can see, the vast majority is unsalvageable.

He takes another step inwards, and half-heartedly flicks the switch on the wall - all of the lights are out, but that doesn’t come as a shock. He’d only need them during the night anyway, and he’s 60% certain there was the Altean equivalent of a torch somewhere in storage before the crash.

After the crash? He’s not so sure.

He’ll find one later. Now, though –

Now he takes the time to sift through the wreckage.

 

 

**4 hours 57 minutes**

She’s looking a little better.

Lance says a little, because there really wasn’t much he could do about the gaping holes in the cockpit and ceiling; he wasn’t Pidge for starters, and even if there _was_ a repair kit on board when they first started out, there definitely isn’t one here now. He’d attempted to climb up onto the remains of her back to try and drape some large sheets he’d found across the gaps, but they hadn’t been big enough, and he’d glossed over the need for tape or a weight to anchor them down in his hurry to block out the heat. The scrap pieces of metal needed removing too, and it took him the best part of an hour to drag each piece out onto the dirt. It was exhausting work, but there’s now a (kind of) neat pile of Altean-equivalent iron rods and plasterboard glittering silver and blue just outside the hangar doors.

It’s an improvement.

 

**5 hours 15 minutes**

A watch.

A paper tag from his jacket.

A singular Altean ‘energy’ bar (as if he didn’t have enough already) –

And a photo of his family.

He double checks, fumbling around in his pockets and patting down his suit for anything he may have missed, but his hands remain empty. Add those to the pile of miscellaneous items he’d managed to retrieve from the rubble, and he had himself several irrelevant and ultimately useless possessions – aside from the large stack of energy bars, he supposes. Lance reaches to his right and grabs for one.

It would get him through the next few hours at least.

He opens it slowly, grimacing at the sticky green residue clinging to the wrapper – it’s vaguely reminiscent of Coran’s space goo, and going on that basis, Lance can’t imagine it tastes all too good. He eats it anyway, chewing small bites of what may as well be rubber and looking out across the landscape.

From his make-shift seat (curtesy of what is probably part of the cockpit), the horizon is rimmed red with the setting –

…sun?

He thinks it’s this planet’s sun.

From what he’s observed so far, there’s a larger orange-looking sun, and a slightly smaller, grey-ish circle that _seems_ to be emitting some sort of light. It could be a moon or something reflecting the sun’s rays he supposes, but whatever.

Not that it really matters either way.

 

(It stains Blue with scarlet)

 

Halfway through the energy bar, he ends up having to shield his eyes with the back of his hand, squinting in an attempt to see through the glare of the sunset. Funnily enough, it’s not like there are many trees or buildings to block the rays, so they’re shining straight into his face, half blinding him. He wonders absently as to whether he’s going to burn if he removes his armour.

The thought perishes with the arrival of the first cloud. It’s large - so much larger than those on earth, with a pink hue that clashes awkwardly with the red sky. It’s pretty nevertheless, and Lance watches as it floats almost serenely across the stars that are beginning to appear, the red seeping into black.

 

He’s still eating when the sun finally sinks below the horizon.

 

**6 hours 12 minutes**

 

In the end, Lance has no choice but to sleep in the wreckage.

The temperature plummeted with the arrival of the night, the humid heat that had made his armour almost unbearable to wear all but vanishing, replaced instead with a biting cold with no regard for Lance’s lack of shelter. The skeleton offers little protection, but he finds that if he hunkers down in the corner of the control room and throws his ripped jacket over himself, he can at least summon up a fraction of heat to warm his exposed neck and hands.

(He can’t feel the piece of metal sticking out into his back through the paladin armour, but corrugated floor is ruptured in places, and it jabs into his ribs uncomfortably. It feels wrong.)

The ceiling of the room is gone of course, so he has a clear view of the night sky above him. He spends a few seconds trying to determine whether this was a good thing or not, and he’s not sure what he settles on.

Whether it’s the weather or the cold press of iron against his body, sleep doesn’t come easily. He thinks he drifts off at one point, only to awaken some time later as a shard of plastic hanging from the ceiling gives out and collides with the ground with a heavy thud, sending a cloud of dust and sand floating towards him.

Lance didn’t think he could feel any worse, but the dust hanging heavy in the air is oppressive and leaves his lungs working harder than they should be.

 

 

He inhales. Coughs. Exhales.

Turns over, closes his eyes, and feigns sleep until it finds him.

 

 

**Later**

He’d woken not long after sunrise, when the dredges of red were beginning to wash out the sky again, pushing back the stars and darkness to a thin strip on the horizon. The heat was back too, cloying and sticky on the back of his neck where the metal had warmed in the sun. Lance had quickly dusted himself down and thrown his jacket over the control panel, seeking some shade underneath the metal skeleton

 

(He takes a moment to rest his hand on the wall, closing his eyes and concentrating.)

(He feels nothing but the corrugated surface.)

 

There was no point in sitting outside at the time, so Lance had settled in the centre of the room with his few belongings spread out in front of him in a semi-circle, as if an idea would magically reveal itself if he organised them in such a way. Five minutes in, and unsurprisingly, nothing had jumped out at him. The items sat stoically on the floor, refusing to provide any ideas – or at least an inkling – of what he should do next.

Which is, after all, what he really needed.

Lance sits, now, in the same position, his head bowed and his neck dripping with sweat. Motionless.

He feels as though something should happen – something that would spur him into motion. Something that would at least give him an objective, or a goal, or even something vaguely threatening to deal with, but instead he’s faced with nothing.

No change. No deviation. Nothing to get the next leg of his story started. There’s only the sound of silence to keep him company, and the longing for something more.

 

The minute hand on his watch continues to run circles around the clock face as the sun slowly sinks in the sky.

His brain aches as night falls, and he prays for a change in narrative.

 

 

But nothing happens.


End file.
